Think you can design a good City of Heroes costume? Reckon you’re not totally colour blind when it comes to matching your tights and your tunic?

Well, our Super Summer Slam Spectacular Costume Competition gives you a chance to prove your skills, win some cool prizes and create a costume that’ll be worn by teams across Europe in our S4 Grand Finals!

For more details on the Costume Competition, visit the official Defiant and Union S4 message boards. For more details on Costume Templates, read on.

Once you’ve created your costume, following our guidelines as seen on the official Defiant and Union message board threads, then you’ll need to send it on over to us in a JPG file - along with a Costume Template, which we’d like to see in plain old text format.

A Costume Template is simple to make; we just want you to copy down all the details you’ll see on your City of Heroes costume creation screen. To make things a little more complicated, we need you to give us the exact ‘codes’ of your chosen colours for your costume, which we’ve put into the grid you’ll see below. This ensures that anyone can re-create your costume exactly. Please make sure you note down everything in your costume on your Template - sometimes it’s not too obvious what choices have been made.

To help you with the Template, first of all, you’ll need the colour grid, which you can see on the left. Click that to get a larger version, or right click and ‘Save Target / Link As..’ here to grab the JPG file.

The colour grid is simple to use. When you need to refer to a colour in the Template, just check the circle you have highlighted in City of Heroes against the grid, and write down the number. So for example, pure black will be A1, and pure white will be J1. Remember to do this while you’re creating the character, because otherwise a trip to Icon will be required!

The Template itself is easy to create. When your costume is completely finished, go down the list of costume components clicking each one, and noting down the costume component name. Remember that your costume should not be dependent on a Body Type (including Head Shape), or a Skin Colour. Therefore, no details for Body Type or Skin Colour need to be included in the resulting Template.

What you should finish up with should look something like what you see below. On the left is the costume we’ve created; on the right is the Template, created by going down the components and noting them down, and including the colours taken from the colour grid.

Head: Masks with hair

Shape: (As original hero)
Face: (As original hero) / Mask 5
(Primary Colour: F11)

Hair: (As original hero)

Detail 1: Glasses 4
(Primary Colour: E2; Secondary Colour: F11)

Detail 2: None

Upper Body: Tight

Chest: Tights 2 / Fade Line
(Primary Colour: E2; Secondary Colour: F11)

Shoulders: None

Chest Detail: None

Gloves: Flared / Leather 1 / None
(Primary Colour: E2; Secondary Colour: F11)

Belt: Metal 3
(Primary Colour: F11; Secondary Colour: F11)

Lower Body: Tight

Pants: Tights 2 / Stripe 1
(Primary Colour: E2; Secondary Colour: F11)

Boots: Flare / Standard / None
(Primary Colour: E2; Secondary Colour: E2)

When you’ve got all of these details finalised, save the details as a plain text file, and then follow the instructions given in the official Defiant and Union S4 message board threads. If you have any questions about creating a Costume Template, that’s the best place to fire them off too.

Good luck to everyone, and we look forward to seeing all of your costumes!